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One life coach says she’s “very passionate about personal productivity.” Hundreds of others call themselves productivity and time management “experts.” Among thousands of business buzzwords, productivity is perhaps the most established and the most coveted.

But what does it actually mean?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, productivity means “the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.” Translation: productivity is how much we can produce with a given amount of time or effort.

The premise of productivity is that more is good.

But in an economy increasingly dominated by machines that totally school our output per unit of input, trying to be productive is a losing game. The machines have “more” covered. To set ourselves apart, we need to produce better: better thinking, better policies, better art, better machines.

In short, for getting ahead in today’s workforce, quantity doesn’t matter. Quality does. Georgetown University professor Cal Newport, whose excellent book Deep Work influenced my thoughts here, explained in a recent email that “deep, audacious results are the only currency that matters.”

And yet, in attempt to increase our productivity, we chase “hacks” such as:

These hacks and hundreds of others condone replacing the hard and important with the easy and quick. What they ultimately accomplish is not progress on a large, important goal but, rather, the feeling of productivity.

According to a writer on Happier.com, “There's a huge, huge difference between a day that feels productive and one that feels annoyingly not so, and the difference is not just in the amount of stuff you get done: it's about how you feel.”

The problem with chasing the feeling of productivity is it lies. What feels productive is answering emails, using productivity apps, running errands and doing admin work. The last time I felt highly productive, I abandoned work to gleefully peruse The Container Store and clean my already-immaculate apartment.

I'm an award-winning freelance writer and speaker covering psychology, culture, social trends and millennial careers. I write for Forbes, Inc., The Huffington Post and Psychology Today, among others. Get in touch with me at